page_title: Victor Borge
section_title: Borge's style
hierarchical_section_title: Victor Borge / Biography / Borge's style
caption_attribution_description: Photo of Victor Borge in concert.
context_page_description: Børge Rosenbaum, known professionally as Victor Borge, was a Danish-American comedian, conductor, and pianist who achieved great popularity in radio and television in the United States and Europe. His blend of music and comedy earned him the nicknames "The Clown Prince of Denmark", "The Unmelancholy Dane", and "The Great Dane".
context_section_description: One of Borge's other famous routines was  "Phonetic Punctuation," in which he read a passage from a book and added exaggerated sound effects to stand for all of the punctuation marks, such as periods, commas, and exclamation marks. Another is his "Inflationary Language," in which he added one to every number or homophone of a number in the words he spoke. For example: "once upon a time" becomes "twice upon a time", "wonderful" becomes "twoderful", "forehead" becomes "fivehead", "anyone for tennis" becomes "anytwo five elevennis", "I ate a tenderloin with my fork and so on and so forth" becomes "I nined an elevenderloin with my fivek and so on and so fifth".
  Borge used physical and visual elements in his live and televised performances. He would play a strange-sounding piano tune from sheet music, looking increasingly confused; turning the sheet upside down or sideways, he would then play the actual tune, flashing a joyful smile of accomplishment to the audience (he had, at first, been literally playing the tune upside down or sideways). When his energetic playing of another song would cause him to fall off the piano bench, he would open the seat lid, take out the two ends of an automotive seat belt, and buckle himself onto the bench, "for safety." Conducting an orchestra, he might stop and order a violinist who had played a sour note to get off the stage, then resume the performance and have the other members of the section move up to fill the empty seat while they were still playing. From off stage would come the sound of a gunshot.
  His musical sidekick in the 1960s, Leonid Hambro, was also a well-known concert pianist. In 1968, classical pianist Şahan Arzruni joined him as his straight man, performing together on one piano a version of Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody, considered a musical-comedic classic.
  He also enjoyed interacting with the audience. Seeing an interested person in the front row, he would ask them, "Do you like good music?" or "Do you care for piano music?" After an affirmative answer, Borge would take a piece of sheet music from his piano and say, "Here is some," and hand it over. After the audience's laughter died down, he would say, "That'll be $1.95" (or whatever the current price might be). He would then ask whether the audience member could read music; if the member said yes, he would ask a higher price. If he got no response from the audience after a joke, he would often add "...when this ovation has died down, of course." The delayed punchline to handing the person the sheet music would come when he would reach the end of a number and begin playing the penultimate notes over and over, with a puzzled look. He would then go back to the person in the audience, retrieve the sheet music, tear off a piece of it, stick it on the piano, and play the last couple of notes from it.
  Making fun of modern theater, he would sometimes begin a performance by asking if there were any children in the audience. There always were, of course. He would sternly order them out, then say, "We do have some children in here; that means I can't do the second half in the nude. I'll wear the tie (pause). The long one (pause). The very long one, yes."
  In his stage shows in later years, he would include a segment with opera singer Marylyn Mulvey. She would try to sing an aria, and he would react and interrupt, with such antics as falling off the bench in "surprise" when she hit a high note. He would also remind her repeatedly not to rest her hand on the piano, telling her that if she got used to it, "and one day a piano was not there – Fffftttt! " After the routine, the spotlight would rest on Mulvey, and she would sing a serious number with Borge accompanying in the background.
caption: Borge performing before an audience in 1957
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